Subject Librarian
Lucinda M. Hall
Contact:
Evans Map Room, Baker-Berry Library
Dartmouth College
25 N Main ST
Hanover, NH 03755
Dartmouth College
25 N Main ST
Hanover, NH 03755
(603) 646-0962
Website Skype Contact: d1128r8@kiewit.dartmouth.edu
Course description
This course is designed to introduce film and media studies majors to some of the field's major scholarly methodologies and their theoretical value in explaining how texts, industries, creative artists, and audiences participate in the meaning-making processes. Students will read scholarship and participate in projects that illuminate how meaning is created and negotiated at the levels of industrial production, artistic creation of texts, and audience knowledge and engagement. The screenings, readings, and assignments will ask the student to think about the relations among his/her own position as a scholar, as an audience member, and as a creative artist. This knowledge provides a foundation for critical thinking skills necessary for the student's success in the major. The course is designed for students who have had some introductory exposure to the principles of film and/or television aesthetics and production techniques, but before they have completed their upper division major requirements. All Film majors and Film modified majors should take this course no later than their junior year.
[Source: ORC/Catalog, 09/16/2022]; DIST: ART
In the Library's collections
Most of the books on films are located in the call number range PN 1993 through PN 1999 on Baker Level 4. You can use one of these subject headings to start your research in the library's online catalog:
- "film theory"This is a title keyword search in the library's online catalog.
- [genre] history and criticismInsert the name of your favorite genre.
Introductory reading(s)
Critical cinema: beyond the theory of practice by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995 .C75 2011ISBN: 9781906660376Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice purges the obstructive line between the making of and the theorising on film, uniting theory and practice in order to move beyond the commercial confines of Hollywood. ...
Defining cinema by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995 .D38 1997ISBN: 9780813523026This text focuses on the theoretical foundations of film studies as a discipline. It combines reprints of essays by major film theorists with contemporary analyses of their work. They offer accounts of what cinema is, how people watch and respond to films, and what constitutes good film-making.
Deleuze and film: a feminist introduction by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781441113405In the first book-length introduction to Deleuze's work on film from a feminist perspective, Teresa Rizzo ranges across Deleuze's books on Cinema, his other writings, and feminist re-workings of his philosophy to re-think the film viewing experience. More than a commentary on Deleuze's books on Cinema, Rizzo's work addresses a significant gap in film theory, building a bridge between the spectatorship studies and apparatus theories of the 1970s, and new theorisations of the cinematic experience. ...
European film theory by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780415960441European Film Theory explores the 'Europeanness' of European film theory, its philosophical origins, the 'culture wars' between 'Continental' and 'Analytical' film theory and philosophy, the major discursive and epistemological shifts in the history of Continental film theory, the relationship between Continental philosophy of art and philosophy of history and European film theory. ...
The film experience: an introduction by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995 .C655 2015ISBN: 9781457663543In our culture, watching movies is a universal experience - but understanding film may not be. The Film Experience reaches out to students, connecting their experiences watching movies with better understanding and knowledge of the medium's full scope. ...
Film theory: an introduction through the senses by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1994 .E53 2015ISBN: 9781138824300Publication Date: 2nd ed.What is the relationship between cinema and spectator? This is the key question for film theory, and one that Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener put at the center of their insightful and engaging book. Every kind of cinema (and every film theory) first imagines an ideal spectator, and then maps certain dynamic interactions between the screen and the spectator's mind, body and senses. Using seven distinctive configurations of spectator and screen that move progressively from 'exterior' to 'interior' relationships, the authors retrace the most important stages of film theory from its beginnings to the present--from neo-realist and modernist theories to psychoanalytic, 'apparatus,' phenomenological and cognitivist theories, and including recent cross-overs with philosophy and neurology. ...
Methods of historical analysis in electronic media by Call Number: Baker-Berry P 91.3 .M48 2006ISBN: 9780805851861Methods of Historical Analysis in Electronic Media provides a foundation for historical research in electronic media by addressing the literature and the methods--traditional and the eclectic methods of scholarship as applied to electronic media. It is about history--broadcast electronic media history and history that has been broadcast, and also about the historiography, research written, and the research yet to be written. ...
Selected book title(s)
The Chinese cinema book by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .C4 C4422 2020ISBN: 9781911239529Publication Date: 2nd ed.This revised and updated new edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of cinema in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as to disaporic and transnational Chinese film-making, from the beginnings of cinema to the present day. ...
Evolution, literature, and film: a reader by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 55 .E86 2010ISBN: 9780231150194Featuring thirty-nine essential essays by pioneering scholars, scientists, and critics, Evolution, Literature, and Film opens with an introduction to the principles of evolution, with essays from Charles Darwin on the logic of natural selection, Richard Dawkins on the genetic revolution of modern evolutionary theory, Edward O. Wilson on the unity of knowledge, Steven Pinker on the transformation of psychology into an explanatory science, and David Sloan Wilson on the integration of evolutionary theory into cultural critique. Later sections include essays on the adaptive function of the arts, discussions of evolutionary literary theory and film theory, interpretive commentaries on specific works of literature and film, and analyses using empirical methods to explore literary problems. ...
Film worlds: a philosophical aesthetics of cinema by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN1995 .Y275 2015ISBN: 9780231157698Film Worlds unpacks the significance of the "worlds" that narrative films create, offering an innovative perspective on cinema as art.
From light to byte: toward an ethics of digital cinema by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780816677627Cinema has been undergoing a profound technological shift: celluloid film is being replaced by digital media in the production, distribution, and reception of moving images. Concerned with the debate surrounding digital cinema's ontology and the interrelationship between cinema cultures, From Light to Byte investigates the very idea of change as it is expressed in the current technological transition. Markos Hadjioannou asks what is different in the way digital movies depict the world and engage with the individual and how we might best address the issue of technological shift within media archaeologies. ...
Seeing fictions in film: the epistemology of movies by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995 .W55 2011ISBN: 9780199594894In works of literary fiction, it is a part of the fiction that the words of the text are being recounted by some work-internal "voice": the literary narrator. One can ask similarly whether the story in movies is told in sights and sounds by a work-internal subjectivity that orchestrates them: a cinematic narrator. George M. Wilson argues that movies do involve a fictional recounting (an audio-visual narration) in terms of the movie's sound and image track. Viewers are usually prompted to imagine seeing the items and events in the movie's fictional world and to imagine hearing the associated fictional sounds. ...
Other library resource(s)
Feminist film theory from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199791286Feminist theory has been foundational to the establishment and development of film studies as a discipline. Although it often gets reduced to key theoretical—primarily psychoanalytic—analyses of spectatorship from the 1970s and 1980s, it has always been and continues to be a dynamic area with many objects of focus and diverse methodological practices. The work cited here offers a sampling of this breadth, historically and topically. ...- Film aesthetics from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199791286Any consideration of aesthetics poses difficulties because of the ways the term has been used to designate particular objects, judgments, experiences, and values. This difficulty becomes perhaps especially acute with regard to film, where aesthetics is used both in highly polemical and specific contexts but also as a way to more simply denote something with an artistic element. First, any assessment of film aesthetics must contend with the precarious position of aesthetics itself more broadly. ...
- Film theory before 1945 from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199791286Film theory, defined broadly as any reflection on the nature and functions of cinema, appeared soon after cinema’s emergence in the mid-1890s. Due to the novelty of the moving image and its quick development into a mass entertainment, around 1910, intellectuals and artists began trying to identify cinema’s particular capacities, articulating their value and highlighting the formal and stylistic techniques best suited to exploiting them. For many, cinema had the capacity to be an art, one that was similar in some respects to the preexisting arts but that differed from and even surpassed those arts in other respects. ...
- Film theory from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199791286Film theory came into its own in the late 1960s and early 1970s, thanks primarily to essays published in journals such as Screen in the United Kingdom and Cahiers du cinema and Communications in France. The first American journal to sign on to the cause was Camera Obscura, which carried the subtitle “A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory” on its first cover in 1976. But thoughtful attempts to make sense of movies appeared almost as soon as the first feature films. ...
Finding scholarly articles & journal title(s)
Articles and other writings about movies can be found in many publications. Our collection has several titles on the theory of film. Two are listed below. You can use Film & Television Literature Index to find more articles or the new search box at the top of the page.
JCMS: Journal of cinema and media studiesCall Number: Electronic journalJCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies is the peer-reviewed, scholarly publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). JCMS's basic mission is to foster engaged debate and rigorous thinking among humanities scholars of film, television, digital media, and other audiovisual technologies. ...
Jump cut: a review of contemporary mediaCall Number: Electronic journalJump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media is an Open Access journal run on a nonprofit basis by its staff and is not affiliated with or supported by any institution. It analyzes media in relation to class, race, and gender.
Historical journal of film, radio, and televisionCall Number: Electronic journalThe Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television is an international and interdisciplinary journal concerned with the history of the audio-visual mass media from c.1900 to the present.
Film & television literature indexCall Number: Electronic resourceThis index covers over 300 journal and magazine titles for film and television reviews, scholarly and critical analysis of cinema and television, and articles of popular interest about film and television. About half the journals and magazines are film periodicals and the other half cover film and television with some regularity. Subject coverage includes film & television theory, preservation & restoration, writing, production, cinematography, technical aspects, and reviews.
Web of science citation databases by Call Number: Electronic resourceThe online version of 3 separate ISI indexes: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index and, Social Sciences Citation Index.
Citing and Tracking Your Bibliographic References
Use this guide to help you learn how to correctly cite and keep track of the references you find for your research.
Keeping up with Film Studies journal literature
Want an easy way to keep up with the journal literature for all facets of Film Studies? And you use a mobile device? You can install the BrowZine app and create a custom Bookshelf of your favorite journal titles. Then you will get the Table of Contents (ToCs) of your favorite journals automatically delivered to you when they become available. Once you have the ToC's, you can download and read the articles you want from the journals for which we have subscriptions.
You can get the app from the App Store or Google Play.
Don't own or use a mobile device? You can still use BrowZine! It's also available in a web version. You can get to it here. The web version works the same way as the app version. Find the journals you like, create a custom Bookshelf, get ToCs and read the articles you want.